Cristóbal Martínez

Martínez attended Arizona State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in studio art and painting in 2002. He remained at the university to earn a master's degree in media art in 2011 and a PhD in rhetoric, composition and linguistics in 2015.[3]

In 2003, he founded the Radio Healer.[1]

Martínez founded the indigenous hacker collective Radio Healer in 2003, a year after completing his first degree at Arizona State University. The collective is made up of Martínez, Melissa S. Rex, Mere Martinez, Rykelle Kemp, Randy Kemp, Ashya Flint, Edgar Cardenas, and Devin Armstrong-Best. Together they create indigenous electronic tools via circuit-bending, appropriation, salvaging, coding, recycling, adaptive reuse, and improvisation to perform indigenous ceremonies based on their imagination.[4]

Their art consisted of moving tools, images, performances, and sounds that aided in creating metaphors to address the semiotic systems that they state are often misinterpreted. The purpose of their collective is to combat these misinterpretations by giving the audience an opportunity to engage in re-imagining indigenous ceremonies. The collective hosts public performances, with the intent that the public will reflect on issues such as warfare, borders, mass surveillance, land use, socioeconomic issues, and historical amnesia. The collective was a former artist-in-residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix Arizona.

Martínez is a member of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary artist collective consisting of himself and Kade L. Twist.[2] The collective's aim is to form metaphors to make sense of shared experiences in a contemporary environment, create productive conversations that go against social, political, and economic processes that ruining communities and ruining geographic areas.

Their work has exhibited in locations and events such as the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2017 Biennial.[7]